You tell your agent what you want. Three bedrooms, two baths, two-car garage, under $500,000. A list of homes comes back, and you assume that’s everything on the market.

It usually isn’t.

On the Randal Jenkins Real Estate Hour, I ran live searches in the Pasco County MLS to show how much a buyer can miss without knowing it. The numbers below are what the MLS showed when we taped in mid-July 2026. They change every day. The lesson doesn’t.

“Exactly” is not what you want

When I searched for exactly three bedrooms, two baths and a two-car garage under $500,000, I got roughly 600 homes.

But would you take a four-bedroom? Probably. Three baths? Sure. A three-car garage? Of course.

When I changed each of those to “or more,” the count jumped to more than 1,500. Same budget. Same county. More than twice the choices.

If your search uses exact matches, you’re looking at a fraction of the homes that fit your needs. Ask your agent how the search is set up.

The checkboxes are only as good as whoever filled them in

Listing agents fill out a data entry form for every MLS listing. Plenty of fields get skipped, guessed at or filled in wrong. That hides homes from buyers and costs sellers buyers they never hear about.

A few examples from the show:

• Big dogs. When I checked only the small-dog option, about 30 homes came up. Adding the larger dog sizes brought it past 700. Homes with no deed restrictions, which generally means no pet limits, added hundreds more, and that field is often left unchecked. In one community, Plantation Palms, I called the HOA for five straight days before someone confirmed there were no pet size restrictions. Not one of the other listings in that neighborhood said so.
• Horses. About 78 Pasco listings were coded “zoned for horses.” When I searched for an acre or more with agricultural-type zoning instead, I found about 195. Over half the properties that might allow a horse weren’t tagged that way.
• Gulf access. The MLS lets agents describe a canal as brackish or saltwater. Buyers looking for Gulf access tend to search saltwater. In one neighborhood where I recently listed a home, three homes with Gulf access were marked brackish. Anyone filtering for saltwater never saw them.

What to do as a buyer

• Tell your agent what you’d accept, not just what you want. “Three or more bedrooms” is a different search than “three bedrooms.”
• Ask your agent to search by the underlying facts, like acreage, zoning or no HOA, instead of relying only on checkboxes.
• Don’t trust a listing’s pet, lease or deed restriction fields. Verify with the HOA or the documents, and confirm zoning with the county.
• Know the limits of Zillow. The MLS lets agents search on far more criteria than Zillow does. Zillow is fine for browsing, but it can’t search for many of these details.

If you’re selling

Same problem, other side of the table. If your listing leaves out the details your buyer is searching for, that buyer may never see your home. Ask your agent which fields they filled in and what keywords are in the public remarks.

The MLS is more than a listing platform. It’s a buyer-matching system, and it can only match what someone told it.

If you’re shopping in Pasco or the rest of Tampa Bay and want a search built the right way, call or text me at 727-409-4663. Let’s look at your options.

Randal Jenkins
Broker-Owner, Florida Real Estate Partners
Loan Officer, American Mortgage Services, NMLS #2053417
727-409-4663 (409-HOME)